You can patent a game, or get a design patent for the distinctive board design.

Unlike copyright, you have to apply for patent before the infringement. Unlike copyright registration, which costs about $40, patent registration costs a non-trivial sum of money. And unlike copyright, a patent will expire.

I really don't see how this is a big issue. If the other companies innovated there wouldn't be this problem, the problem is -all- companies try to do is make the exact same thing as Zynga and don't innovate past that, so of course Zynga is going to win. Its just like every other video game trend, Space Invaders popular? Make a game and call it Space Intruders or something. Pac-Man popular? Change up the art and the maze designs a bit. Super

The -entire- early gaming industry was based off of clones. And yes, clones a million times more similar than FarmVille is to FarmTown. Of course, we don't really remember them too much because we have biases towards the originals.

So far, Zynga has been smart enough to avoid that particular trap, but the odds of coming a bit too close may be enough to gut them financially (not from the small operators, mind, but from one of the big boys, e.g. Mattel and the like).

From what I remember, Farm Town had better features than FarmVille (you could actually chat with other players, you could go to other farms, see people there and help harvest their fields). But it was a flakier game, more prone to crashing.

Okay, I'm sad to say I've given more of my time then I'd like to Facebook games. I'm also happy to say that I've managed to reform myself. Finally broke myself free (and am in the process of "de-friending" people who I friended just for the player boost).

This shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone. Lots of games in arcades ripped off competitors. The only difference with Zynga is that its much more visible to people.

Heck, between the limited game mechanics available, they actually only have one or two games, with LOTS of reskinning between different flavors of them. Hopefully this will encourage more innovation but the sad fact is, that it will only discourage innovation, since if you DO come up with something fun and innovative, there is the concern that someone like Zynga will come along and just rip it off lock/stock/barrel, so why bother?

You can't patent/copyright/etc gameplay mechanics. There were news stories a year or so back about legal action against a popular scrabble rip-off that was popular on facebook. The issue was basically resolved by the devs changing the visuals to not exactly match scrabble, and change their game's name to something that didn't resemble scrabble.

Basically, you can't steal their art or their name, but your game can play exactly the same way.

But Zynga doesn't -care- about their games and won't move past a certain threshold of "fun". All Zynga cares about is getting hits to its page and getting people to purchase crap. A good version of, say, FarmVille that was basically like Harvest Moon and let you -do- stuff rather than point click, wait an hour, return. Could completely eat up FarmVille's marketshare.

But it seems like so far no one has really done that. They all just want to try to compete with Zynga by doing the exact same thing they co

It's refreshing to hear some honesty in business. Don't pretend your product is revolutionary. Don't try to change the world. Just make money using proven methods. That's good, honest business right there.

It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.

Here we have a story of someone seeing someone else doing something and basically saying, "I can do that." Do we get upset when a new pizza restaurant opens up? Or perhaps another excavation company? What makes this worse than some company saying "Hey, I can do that cheaper."

I realize there are issues with respect to intellectual property, but this IS an important point of discussion. When is the line crossed?

J#C#Oh, hell... let's just say most of.NET and be done with it. Continuing..

Except that Java wasn't open source at the time and thus none of those are clones of FOSS software? Oh is this ignoring the fact that Java 6 and 7 have blatantly copied features out of C# and.NET?

The rest of what you quote is pretty lame. If that's the best you can do for your claims that proprietary software is "often" a clone of a FOSS product your claims are even more laughable now then they originally looked.

The first 3 are probably jabs at being clones of Java but ignoring the fact that Java wasn't open source at the time they were created. The IE7 thing is probably him trying to claim that IE7 ripped off Firefox despite the fact that the features he is going to claim that were ripped off from Firefox were actually first implemented in the proprietary Opera browser. With Sharepoint and ForeFront he is probably going to claim that some FOSS project that 3 people have ever heard of may have implemented similar

It does lead to an interesting debate regarding what we (the net) consider to be right and acceptable.

Here we have a story of someone seeing someone else doing something and basically saying, "I can do that." Do we get upset when a new pizza restaurant opens up? Or perhaps another excavation company? What makes this worse than some company saying "Hey, I can do that cheaper."

I realize there are issues with respect to intellectual property, but this IS an important point of discussion. When is the line crossed?

I don't see people complaining when the "I can do that cheaper" turns into lower prices for those pizzas, or cars, or processors, or RAM, etc... I thought people liked having AMD to keep Intel's prices in check.

I don't see people complaining when the "I can do that cheaper" turns into lower prices for those pizzas, or cars, or processors, or RAM, etc... I thought people liked having AMD to keep Intel's prices in check.

The problem comes when someone says "I can do that" and "I can do that cheaper", but not "I can do that better", and certainly not "I have any obligation to keep doing that cheaper after I've used the first two statements to drive my competitors out of business without so much as a tip of my hat to them". Add in "I can't do that better, but I can use my marketing clout to make everyone ignore my better and/or cheaper competitors", and you wind up with stifled innovation. Smaller pizza shops don't want to

When I read the phrase "whales" I was reminded of the movie Boiler Room, about a fraudulent brokerage firm that tried to pump up the value of stock and sell them to suckers and the crossroads of stupid and rich were named, "Whales."

Is it immoral? Who knows. Is it illegal? that's for the courts to decide. am I going to spend my money there? Hell no.

There's nothing honest about this. The quoted narrative is internal to the company - they'll never go on record saying that they've 'borrowed' from their competitors. The software industry is a world of ideas - taking ideas from others and using 'business acumen' to leave the original inventors in the dust is as dishonest as it gets. This is why software companies are forced to spend enormous amounts of money on patents and litigation. And at that point the winners are determined by the quality/price of the

How the flying fuck do you get 'honesty' from "SF Weekly says interviews conducted with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual."?

Former employees revealing a company's theft of IP != honesty in business.

I understand them not wanting to go through the hassle of wire transfers for everyone, that's where the ease of credit cards come in. I think it's good of them to offer this fee avoiding method to big time users. They're obviously passing the savings back onto the user in the form of bonus.
As for the complaints about wasting money... how much do you pay for cable tv every month? At least these games are social and interactive.
I don't play any zynga games myself but do play some free MMO's and pay-to-play MMO's as well and have no problem spending money on things I enjoy. And no.. I do not pay for cable tv, and only use my tv set for netflix and console.

Hundreds of thousands of people hunched in front of glowing monitors, clicking their mice and banging their keyboards. Not one of them actually talking to each other, just posting game-generated messages about game progress, wishlists, and canned in-game requests.

Where is the "social" aspect of such games? Even FPS games with voice headsets are more "social" because they allow/encourage the players to yell at each other!

ABA wire transfer fees are comparable to so-called credit card discount rates at this size of transaction. They're only doing it because it can't be charged back once somebody receiving the bill wises up to the scam.

my wife used to buy the scratch off tickets and once in a while i used to take the winning ones to the store to cash them out. i noticed that they scan the bar code to verify a winning ticket. and most of the people i see buying them scratch them off with hope and dreams.

farmville is not that different than most RPGs except its freemium. most RPG's the game play is very repetitive with minor rewards along the way. farmville is free to start and you pay if you want the rewards faster.

I think this idea started with Napoleon and his practice of giving soldiers ribbons for bravery in battle. people would risk their lives for a colored piece of cloth

RPGs are analogous to books though. In Final Fantasy 9, you had to deal with Queen Brahne and Kuja and the Ilifa Tree and Garland and the mist and another world and everything, with a whole opera played out on this. In Final Fantasy 8, the story was completely different, around military tactics and a really weird piece of magic. In Tales of Symphonia we had to deal with parallel worlds and a sociopathic immortal and some other political shit. The stories are all different.

I don't know if it works differently in California from my state, but I worked (briefly) at a gas station and for all lotto tickets we used a separate scanner connected to a modem or network connection or something to validate tickets. Re-scanning a previously scanned winning ticket would just tell you it had already been redeemed.

I would expect that scanning a ticket to check if it won would involve a check back to the lottery people's network/mainframe/whatever. I would think that if that's the case, any scanned ticket is marked purchased and used, and that being the case, the store is responsible for paying the lottery for it. And since the store's odds aren't any better than anybody else's odds, they should end up losing money.

And then later, when it is seen that a whole bunch of tickets were scanned days apart from each other (most people I've seen don't scratch off the tickets at the store), something looks fishy. If the same person was working the register all those times, the game is up, and lotto fraud is a big-time no-no.

I can't say how it is down in the States, but I know in Canada the way that scratch tickets work is that they have a bar code on the back, and a serial number hidden under the scratch portion. In order to validate the ticket, the retailer scans the bar code, and then looks for the serial number. The bar code is just a digital representation of the serial number, EXCEPT for the last three digits. The retailer plugs in the last three digits, and then the validator talks to the lotto central server and spits b

I'm not sure how you define a traditional system, but out of the five Japanese martial arts disciplines that I have practiced none that I can recall had 5 kyu (colored blets). I would say 6 kyu is the most common, but 10 kyu systems also exist. But you could be right about american dojos treating martial arts as a business rather than an art. In Europe, and as far as I know, Japan, trainers are almost always teaching without any compensation at all. And this includes even the most proficient masters. You teach because it means doing a service to the art -- some even travel to other countries for a few years to establish dojos and try to spread the art. Such efforts are often considered, apart from mental and physical skill, when handing out the higher ranked black belts.

Whales as slang is a term referring to high rollers at casinos. You know, those people who are willing to part with large quantities of money in one sitting. I imagine that's why they use it to describe their customers.

I know that others have posted the same thing, but they all got modded up so I'm karma whoring in the same way Zynga steals game ideas.Since copying others seems to work so well, I wanted to give it a try.

Boiler Room? From 2000? No, that term has been used by casinos far longer than that. It was in the movie Casino, from 1995, for instance.

The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. And if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some twenty-five-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number.

I don't understand the people railing against Facebook-based or other games because of the so-called issue of paying real money for in-game credits. People put in real quarters to play a video games at the arcade, they subscribe to World of Warcraft and other MMORGs.

You're not paying for credits, you're paying for entertainment provided by the game.

Paying a subscription fee to play a game like an MMO - that is paying for entertainment. Everyone has to pay the same fee, and its remarkably good value for money if you enjoy playing the game

Paying money to get something that lets you win the game more effectively. That is unbalancing and ensures those with more money to blow get ahead of those who are unable/unwilling/not stupid enough to pay extra money to get the edge on their competition.

To use an example from a more standard game (which I don't play at all mind you), how much fun would poker be if you got dealt 5 cards, but if you wanted to pay $15 more you could get a 6th card that other players didn't have? It would unbalance the game, and everyone who wanted to compete would be forced to also buy extra cards to keep the balance up. Only the rich would play and the real winner would be the house, selling off the extra cards. That is the model many MMO game companies want us to accept. Sadly there are a lot of players who see the fact that they have cash on hand as justification for their lack of sportsmanship and willingness to get ahead of other players who are better, by buying the edge required.

this goes back years. Microsoft used to do the same thing. they would visit a company, see a product, decline to buy it and then it would come up in the next version of WIndows. lately i see that Windows has a lot of third party licensed software. Apple is buying up small companies and last week there was news how Apple stopped doing business with a design firm that showed off an ipad lookalike. apple pays others to design products or parts of them.

big companies with herds of MBA's take years to do anything and then it's so bad no one wants to use it. a few guys in a garage always innovate. look at YouTube, Facebook and all the current big names. AOL had a video service years ago and they used the actor from married with children to advertise it on TV. shockingly it died.

this goes back years. Microsoft used to do the same thing. they would visit a company, see a product, decline to buy it and then it would come up in the next version of WIndows. lately i see that Windows has a lot of third party licensed software.

Two reasons why you see a lot of licensed code in Microsoft products:

1. Other companies got wise and treated Microsoft with the appropriate degree of paranoia.2. Microsoft realized it was often cheaper to write a check than get burned See http://en.wikipedia.org/wi [wikipedia.org]

point is that two guys in a garage will take a risk and create something revolutionary like youtube or facebook or a personal computer. their risk is their time and a little money they might lose.

large companies will have Oracle Financials and other software to model risk and there will be endless meetings about a new product, evolving feature sets, etc. Sony had some cool stuff in the 1990's in the labs except the media guys would cry piracy and the top management killed or crippled every single potential

Zygna's business model, as the article says, is to just copy a game and then add a whole lot of "spam your friends" features. Unfortunatly, like AOL disks before them, this works and they've got the largest base of gamers on Facebook. The absolute worst part is that other companies saw the success of the "spam like hell and don't worry about the consequences" business model and immediately followed suit, so that all games on Facebook feel the need to post 4 or 5 messages a day to your wall/friends wall/friends messages/email/sms/friends email/etc...

Even big names like EA got into the game. They bought up Playfish earlier and immediately started adding as many "spam your friends" features as they could think of to all of the PF games. Worse, as Facebook adds features to block (automatically or manually) said spam messages, the companies work as fast as possible to get around the blocks. Right now I have half a dozen posts from some damn fugly animal breeding game or something that make it through because they're posted as pictures in the account or something.

Also, if you want to see what unbridled evil look like, pull up any of those games and check out the "free cash offers", which look like an inbox without a spam filter. "Sign up for an UzbeckBank Credit Card and get 100 fake "real money" coins!". Fill out this fake survey with tons of personal information for 10 coins. etc...

People may learn about these games because of their inherent social networking hooks, but they're playing them and spending money on them because they're fun. No amount of advertising is going to make a boring game fun.

There may be more fun games out there, but if their designers fail to get the word out, then they screwed up. There's nothing stopping the originators from taking a page right out of Zynga's book and adding the social network hooks to their "original" games. They don't, and Zynga drinks their

There's nothing stopping the originators from taking a page right out of Zynga's book and adding the social network hooks to their "original" games.

You're misunderstanding the situation.

These are social network games that Zynga's ripping off. FarmVille, for example, is almost (or was at launch) the exact same game as FarmTown. Both were on Facebook etc. Both had very similar social hooks.

What's different is that Zynga at this point has inertia. When FarmVille launched, people who played any of their games were deluged with advertising and promos encouraging them to try out FarmVille for a month or more.

I dare you to play Mafia Wars and then call it fun. About the most you can say about the gameplay is "it's addictive". In fact try that with any Zygna game, or really almost every game on Facebook.
There are some standouts that at least try to be fun. Crazy Planets for instance is a worms clone that does alright, although it's directly in EA's crosshairs to be ruined next. Family Feud is a quick diversion and sometimes humorous (mostly with the "answer detection" anomalies). Most games are "click to s

And I know nothing about Zynga, I just saw this pattern on similar "farming" games on the iPhone.

This is just the natural growth from Mafia wars and Farmville. These games are simplistic games based on a simple mathematical progression formula, and they are designed to make you want to get into the game as often as you can until you can't stand it any more and move on. Then you end up moving onto another game which is similar but then ends up being the exact same game.

When the iPhone came out, two major companies basically had a formula where they created mafia wars clones, then they decided to clone their own games! They made games based on ninjas, racing, spacefaring, transformers ripoffs, westerns, superheroes, etc, but the game was EXACTLY the same, just different names for the weapons, properties and missions. The business model was simple, offer the games for free, get as many people onto the games, offer them free "points" if they spent money on the game, then have them use those points to make themselves ultra powerful faster than us mere mortals who simply wanted to progress with the game normally. Eventually, script kiddies and low level hackers basically tried to get those points for free, because there was a high incentive to do so and the code was relatively simplistic to hack, and you get major hackers running around in the game killing every honest person and making their life hell so all those people move onto a new game... which was just a version of the old game in a new wrapper. Eventually the rich kiddies would come to dominate that game because they had the money, and the script kiddies would come to "0wn" that game too and ruin it and make everyone move on again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

These types of games are stupid, and are designed to get large payouts from a few stupid rich people who wipe their asses with $100. The games are not meant to be complex, and are meant to be easily copied by the creators, so it's easy for someone else to copy them as well. So it becomes a mad dash for the next shiny means of distracting people and saying "hey if you want to be L337 maybe you should give me $500 for some power pills!" And in order to keep ahead of script kiddies you have to basically perform a refresh of the business model by releasing a new game every now and then that's exactly like the old game but just looks different. So all of this is entirely unsurprising. No one is trying to inject any quality here or distinguish themselves. Doing so would cost more money and this isn't about investment, it's about quick very short term profits. The spammers have branched out and are happy that placed like Facebook and the iPhone have made it so easy to develop and distribute stupid simple games.

Far be it from me to stop these evil people from stealing from the rich, but for the rest of us, to paraphrase WOPR, the only way to win these games is by not playing.

Zynga was actually the tipping point for me closing my Facebook account. The privacy issues didn't harm me since I didn't put in any information you couldn't find in a phonebook, but the endless stream of "Alice reamed Bob's mafia in AssWars!" messages killed it for me.

FWIW, it's pretty easy to block all messages from a single app (or user) forever.

I tried that, and by the time I deleted or blocked all the games, psuedo-spammers (I'm going to the bar tonight, look at me world!) I really had nothing valuable left vs the immense time investment required to keep up. Zap, account deleted.

Most people use facebook like they (used to?) use TV, as a way to fill empty time. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you rapidly get rid of both.

Arguably their behavior may involve elements of anti-trust activity if they have a stranglehold on the market. Not knowing the status of the market for FB game (I believe they have at least one large competitor), I dont know if this is the case. But if they do qualify as a monopoly (or even a duopoly) their may be consequences to such behavior.

And lets not even get into the illegal vs unethical discussion.

Lastly, it may be important enough for some users to stop playing their games. Some people DO actually

Except that they ripped off the "FarmTown" game, which existed LONG before it. I'm not sure how it isn't a total copyright violation, but I'm sure that by the time the litigation got through the works, it would probably be too late for whoever ACTUALLY did all the hard work of coming up with that game to recoup their losses.

Zynga are nothing more than a bunch of thieves. Whether their theft is legalized or not is probably up for debate, but it's theft nonetheless.

So it's unethical to copy a decent unpatented idea that's been ineptly marketed and turn it into a titan of the industry? I disagree. If they were so concerned, they could have applied for a design patent or a trademark. Problem is: there are already farming games out there in the world. FarmTown is just as derivative as Farmville, just marketed and developed poorly. Simply moving the farming game paradigm to a social network hardly counts as innovation worthy of protection, IMO.

It's unfortunate that FarmTown sucked balls compared to Farmville back then and probably still does, otherwise they may have actually made a "good" Facebook "game" after getting some people to actually play it.
Whoever does it better wins, there's nothing more to it.

From US Copyright Office publication FL108 [copyright.gov]: "Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects onl

Blizzard has certainly had some games that were derivative. Warcraft was in some ways derivative of Dune. And Diablo was essentially just a standard rogue-like game but with better graphics and slightly more options. And there wasn't much that was innovative to WoW. However, some things Blizzard has done have been very noteworthy. Starcraft for example was the first real time strategy game that had very different tech trees and units for each side but was still balanced. And they did that with not just two,

Balanced is fun when you are playing for a challenge or with friends/people.On the other hand, I liked one of the Real-Time strat games (forget which one since I'm not at home in front of my library), where they made the stats file a simple.INI style file.

Great idea, and very useful to give me a "leg up" over the computer. Who needs a cheat code or trainer if you can modify the game's rules to let you create an army of unstoppable tanks for relatively little money?:D

Doesn't it sound pretty close to following the Microsoft business techniques?

It should. It's called being a second mover [wikipedia.org]. Being first to market with something sometimes provides a market advantage but often being second is more valuable because you can learn from the mistakes of the other guy. Furthermore you don't have the risk and expense of discovering or establishing a marketplace for the product. It's basically a part of the free rider problem. Being a second mover carries risks (you might not be able to follow fast or well enough) but it is a time tested and successful bu